> McFarlane, however, disliked the job intensely, only writing the fourth volume after requesting and receiving a higher fee than usual. He declined to write any further titles, writing afterwards that "starvation seemed preferable." McFarlane's antipathy towards the series stemmed largely from his discomfort from writing about two girls under a female pseudonym. Adams assigned the series next to Mildred Benson, who was also writing the Nancy Drew series. Benson also did not particularly enjoy writing the series, stating at one point that "I never felt the same kinship with the Danas that I…

RPG.SE can handle particular kinds of those things on main site, depending on what the question is specifically (goals are important to define). And this chat can often be helpful, provided it's for a system that the chatizens are familiar with.

I asked a question that got closed for not being suited for the Q&A format that RPG.SE uses, and was told that my question would work better on a discussion forum.
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> Talking with myselves. Once per session you can confer via interdimensional hologram with a version of yourself from an alternate universe. After the conversation, pick one: earn a fate point; learn the answer to one question and make it an aspect with a free invoke; or gain access to a new stunt until the end of the session.

> I'll save me! Once per adventure you can concede after taking stress by revealing that you were an alternate universe version of yourself. Remove any physical consequences you gained in that conflict, and don't get fate points for the concession.

What is the name of the Dark Sun adventure in 4e that was clearly written by someone with no idea about Dark Sun? It featured a river, horses, and other blatant gaps in the implementation of the setting. You have spoken of it before

Unfortunately while I can give you reading feedback on ya game my complete lack of a vehicle and thus access to players means that if I do play it it's because I'm drunk enough that the slowly-swelling collection of stuffed dolls in my home has started to talk to me.

@BESW I don't suppose you have such a thing as a page reference for the flagrant river & horses 'cause the guy I'm talkin' with seems to think it's a hidden underground stream treated as the wonder it ought to be

"And if you'll look out the right side of your railroad car, you'll see a much more interesting plot hook."

It looks like the stream, and the horses and oxen, were the result of 4e's attempt to streamline (npi) its production and advertise its secondary products, by using its licensed Dungeon Tiles art for all its adventure maps.

And of course those tiles weren't illustrated with Dark Sun in mind.

So you get Generic McSameoldmap for your All-New All-Different Post-Apocalyptic Hellscape publication.

But apparently it had further continuity issues:

> - The use of apparently steel weaponry on the cover, despite the fact that Athas is metal-poor. - The appearance of a Urikite templar in the heart of Tyr. - The use of a written note as a plot hook in a world that is primarily illiterate. - The alliance of Thri-kreen and elves, two races that hate each other. - The inclusion of magic items in treasure parcels, rather than the alternative treasures suggested in Dark Sun Campaign Setting.

Hmm ... planning on starting a 2e campaign (for reasons). Got a bunch of day 2 options worked up, but don't have any inspired starting missions. We know all the cliches (shady stranger in a tavern, prison break, caravan raided, etc) ... got any non-cliche suggestions?

One campaign, everyone was rounded up by the local authorities and assigned a recon mission for a tip-off about trouble that the authorities needed to say they'd done something about but didn't think it was really legit and maybe it was a trap.

But constantly reacting to things is frustrating. There's a reason one of the most tired "edgy" superhero plots is "The superhero gets tired of waiting for the villain's next plot and does something about it."

BESW is right here, the traditional DnD hack and slashing gets really unsavory if you think about it too much. Even if you assume that objectively Evil creatures exist, but that assumption itself is a bit nasty at times.

I'm trying to go deeper in the values tonight with my game, with the status quo being unsavory and players hopefully working to change it. In likely destructive ways - I haven't planned it at all but there's plenty of ways it could go horribly wrong... or right.

So, going back to the original premise of heroic tropes re: reactive vs proactive agency.

D&D is rooted in reactive heroic tropes, and the stereotypical "you all meet in a tavern and someone bribes you to have the adventure we're already gathered around the game table because we agreed we want to do this" opening scene is a good reflection of that.

But players get bored of reactive agency pretty easily, and D&D offers the mechanical and narrative tools to become proactive agents of change very quickly. This is what's known as "going off the rails."

Because I've got the NPCs designed based on their goals and how they've planned to achieve them, it's easier to improvise in response to the chaos.

The PCs have their own goals and they may not know or care about the NPCs' plans and desires--but simply by existing in the same area, the NPCs have to respond to the PCs as the PCs are wrecking their plans.

PCs tend to be active agents of entropy and chaos in the fictional world. I found it was much easier to embrace that and plan accordingly, than to try and contain them.

Because, well, it makes the players happier: they're proactive! They're making real choices that make a real difference to the game world and the world is responding to them! That's awesome and affirming.

And it made me happier because I got to be surprised by the game too, and I wasn't constantly trying to herd cats.

Another consideration is "how big is the adventuring world?" It's quite possibly much smaller than you might think. The "wild west" was just one chunk of one continent, and then only for about 3 decades before civilisation ended it.

Bubblegumshoe has a fun set of character questions toward this end: "Why does your character try to solve mysteries instead of minding her own business?" and "What, unrelated to mystery-solving, does your character want to accomplish?"

Heh. For one of my last D&D 3.5 games, I put everybody on an island.

It was a complex island with a lot going on, but it was geographically very small.

One reason was to limit my prep requirements, but also it meant that no matter where they went or what they did, they'd be tripping over multiple NPC plans and plots that were interconnected with other areas and other people.

It was a good little microcosm that meant everything they did felt narratively coherent.

...I actually do that semi-regularly. Our Dresden Files Accelerated playtest was set on a tiny island off the coast of Hawaii, where half the PCs were trying to hide from the wizard cops.

Tonight's plan is this: a society is run by three rival leaders, each with their own virtues and vice. The status quo is unstable and unjust: one of the leaders is essentially the boss of the slave race whose unique abilities are needed to keep the community running. Furthermore, the community is under military pressure.

I really want to see how may players right the wrongs, or escalate it further. Maybe for something beautiful to emerge from the ruins.

@BESW one of my DM peeves are the PCs that go on a mindless road trip for no other reason than the map says there's another country over the next hill.

I've got this in part of the starter description: "Back in civilisation a bloody civil war is sparking, and capable folk will find themselves dragooned into militias and thrown into the meat grinder of the front lines, any special equipment confiscated for the King’s elite forces."

A big "road-trip" campaign could also be structured around getting to some place, skilled up, for some big event. Means a rule-set that supports gathering skills and abilities like treasure, and not a simple consequence of levelling up.

like, our group contained a couple of people who were being actively hunted by the Wizard version of the Inquisition, and there was absolutely no way to simply get away form them. The farthest we could go was pretty close to everywhere, so we had to find ways to lay low, stay out of notice, etc.

A pair of brothers who started out having given up on vengeance for their father's murder, then found out their traveling companion they'd made friends with was the genuinely repentant murderer, and that got all kinds of messy toward the end with struggles to retain faith in their gods and such.

It's quite common for RPG campaigns to have two parallel plotlines: the GM's plotlne and the players' plotline. The GM's plotline usually gets more attention, but if you ditch it, you'll see the players work towards building a plot of their own. Hopefully.

They learned that the governor of one city was secretly studying magical items, so they'd return to him whenever they found something cool or weird, and he'd show them the new stuff he'd invented based on the last stuff they'd brought him. Toward the end of the campaign he provided an armada of earth-sailing ships crewed by a gnome army who conjured arrows from thin air by telling jokes, all made possible by the PCs' relationship with him.

They helped a pirate king put his dead wife to rest and halt the slave trade he'd been supporting, and legitimized his hidden city with formal trade deals to other cities.

They bought a traveling salesman a dog because he was lonely on the road, and by the end of the campaign he'd been instrumental in helping them broker peace between two nations.

@doppelspooker Yeah, that one was intense. He'd been a paladin for a conquering empire and he'd killed the brothers' dad in battle invading their city. Then he realized that his cause wasn't just and joined a secretive order dedicated to making magic available to everyone in the world. The PCs joined him on a quest to defeat a demon for the order, and just before the big battle he came clean with his real identity.

After much drama, they forgave him... but the battle went badly and the demon escaped. The brother who was a cleric tried to comfort the paladin but the paladin lost faith and left the party.

The next time they saw him, he tricked them into helping with a coup to overthrow the secretive order so he could have the power and influence to make everything right again.

@kviiri The current campaign I'm a player in has a DM plot line, and only a DM plot line. We found a castle in a nearby forest (killed the locals, took their stuff) but if we decide to set up base there "you'd all become NPCs, because this campaign is all about the story of the Mary Sue Village".

@kviiri I ran several games with the basic structure of "Here's some basic plot that's mostly an excuse to wander through this world I've made, and I'll take notes on what you like. All that stuff will come back as major elements in the main campaign, which I'll finalize once I've seen what you like."

@ACuriousMind I have lists of campaign ethnic names written down (99 dwarven names, 99 elven names, 99 anglo-saxon names, etc). Whenever I have a random NPC that needs a name I take one down, pass it around, now I have 98 names on the list.

I want to keep my PCs aware of named NPCs without them having to take the notes and remember their role in the world

So I have six piles for NPCs: three, one for each of the major factions, fourth for "society's dregs" who are outsiders to the factional politics, fifth for external threats, and sixth for the PCs and their allies

Each item on the pile would be a small card consisting of a name and the briefest descriptor that adequately captures a character's role: "Sheriff - Slaver, Warrior, Leader" for example.

That chart is based on rope made from materials found on earth. D&D rope is based on materials found in popular fiction, which have a well documented history of having a tensile strength inversely proportional to the dramatic tension of the scene. — Derek Stucki1 hour ago

The players decided to interrupt an arrest of an intruding slave caste member, our Brainer used Unnatural Lust Transfix to make him spill the beans about a low-intensity terror plot to hurt the oppressing class, and decide to help the slaves.

They intrude the slaves' turf to meet their leader, and come to terms about killing the SLAVER WARRIOR LEADER. However, the Brainer made a show, so the slave leader decided to order a hit on her as well.

The overall result was a revolution in both the slave and the master communities, with our Chopper emerging as the leader of the community and the Brainer becoming a religious liberator icon for the slave caste.

She became a revered icon after using that lust transfix too much ;)

Everyone had fun and I managed to showcase some really appealing sides of the system - for one, being able to fit a movie's worth of story in a single sesh.